CONSTANTINE SAMUEL RAFINESQUE. ^3 



book of animals, and I became a zoologist and a naturalist. 

 My early voyage made me a traveller. Thus, some accidents 

 or early events have an influence on our fate through life, or 

 unfold our inclinations."* 



Rafinesque read books of travel, those of Captain Cook, Le 

 Vaillant, and Pallas especially ; and his soul was fired with the 

 desire " to be a great traveller like them. . . . And I became 

 such," he adds tersely. At the age of eleven he had begun a 

 herbarium, and had learned to read the Latin in which scientific 

 books of the last century were written. " I never was in a reg- 

 ular college," he says, " nor lost my time in the dead languages ; 

 but I spent it in reading alone, and by reading ten times more 

 than is read in the schools. I have undertaken to read the 

 Latin and Greek, as well as the Hebrew, Sanskrit, Chinese, 

 and fifty other languages, as I felt the need or inclination to 

 study them." At the age of twelve he published his first scien- 

 tific paper, Notes on the Apennines, as seen from the back of 

 a mule on a journey from Leghorn to Genoa. Rafinesque was 

 now old enough to choose his calling in life. He decided to 

 become a merchant ; for, said he, " commerce and travel are 

 linked." At this time came the first outbreaks of the French 

 Revolution, when the peasants of Provence began to dream of 

 " castles on fire and castles combustible " ; so Rafinesque's 

 prudent father sent his money out of France and his two sons, 

 Constantine and Anthony, to America. 



In Philadelphia, it is said, " No one knew where he came 

 from, no one knew where he went on his return." According 

 to his own story, Constantine Rafinesque became a merchant's 

 clerk, and his spare time was devoted to the study of 

 botany. He tried also to study the birds ; but he says, 

 " The first bird I shot was a poor chickadee, whose death 

 appeared a cruelty, and I never became much of a hunter." 

 During his vacations Rafinesque travelled on foot over parts 

 of Pennsylvania and Virginia. He visited President Jefferson, 

 who, he tells us, asked him to call again. In 1805, receiv- 

 ing an offer of business in Sicily, Rafinesque returned to 

 Europe. He spent ten years in Sicily the land, as he sums it 



* This and most of the other verbal quotations in this paper are taken 

 from an Autobiography of Rafinesque, of which a copy exists in the Library 

 of Congress. A few quotations have been somewhat abridged. 



